Last night when my girlfriend and I turned on my xbox 360 to go to my netflix I was stopped by a mandatory update. I hadn’t heard anything about this yet so I headed online to check out if they were changing anything I might benefit from, or maybe be an inconvenience. Well I quickly found out that this update wasn’t really going to affect me, but it certainly could affect some of the more non-law abiding citizens of the xbox community. As it turns out Microsoft slipped in a little surprise for those who have modded their xboxs to allow them to play pirated games. When said pirates tried booting up their illegal copies of Halo Reach and Call of Duty: Black Ops they were met with something other then the game they wanted to play, which was a blank screen. It was also mentioned that when they attempted to boot the game a second time it would power of the console.

There aren’t any reports of people getting insta-banned, or banned at all for that matter since this update but it is likely Microsoft could be flagging these incidents for further investigation. There was also a post on one of the more popular know xbox hacking communities that didn’t express a whole lot of concern towards this update. It looks as if they’ll be fighting back with an update of their own to allow their community to continue playing any game that they want without purchasing it.

Now again today it looks as if Microsoft has removed the gamerzone tag from users gamercards, or have they? There is suspicion that they could have snuck in a few more defense mechanisms directed toward pirate gamers, although nothing has been confirmed yet. There hasn’t been a whole lot of action against hackers by microsoft lately but I do think that it’s going to be very interesting to see what the next step is by either Microsoft or the hacking community.

My personal opinion on the matter is that when the opportunity is right there to get them for free I can’t blame people for wanting to take advantage of that. With that being said I do not agree with their decisions, and I can’t blame Microsoft for not just letting them do it since they’re still making a profit on the gamers that are willing to pay for their games. Microsoft has put a lot of hard work and good ideas to use and they should be reaping the full rewards, but in this day and age a situation like this is inevitable. For people like me, I look forward to just sitting back and watching.